


April is the Cruelest Month

by ursa_maritima



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel
Genre: Other, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 18:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13083210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ursa_maritima/pseuds/ursa_maritima
Summary: i've been poking at this for several years but I'm saying fuckit and posting this first weird little intro, pretty much exactly as it came to my brain.(ergo, nobody else has read it, thus unbeta'd, thus unedited, osv.)right now the ratings and warnings don't apply, but i don't remember if I can change those later.





	April is the Cruelest Month

(The Burial of the Dead)

The first time the Black Widow thinks about defecting, she is 20, flushed with the success of one of her first major missions, and she doesn't look at the phone number and call sign as a way out. She commits it to memory, thinking to herself that it is a way in, the perfect infiltration, a Trojan horse, and manages to carefully not think about why she never mentions it to her handlers. even when she overhears them complaining about the difficulty in placing sleeper agents. it’s hers, this tool; her choices govern its use, and hers alone.

The second time is after Murmansk, after Lovozero, and she is older. She shakes her handlers, crosses the city until she is confident she isn't being surveilled, and finds a pay phone. With a few tweaks it's as secure as she can make it, and she waits as she dials the numbers from memory. She inhales deeply at the click of the connection finishing.  
“Yes, it is Elena, calling about the au pair position? Is it still available?” She says, letting a touch of soft country accent her otherwise flawless French. Silence, crackling over the line, and then an irritated voice.  
“What?” Natalia's eyes narrow, but she repeats herself in English.  
“Yes, it is Elena, calling about the au pair postion? Is it still available?” More silence, then the voice, bored, begins saying something about knowing her party’s extension- but she’s already gone, stripping her little trick from the payphone and leaving it scattered in unrecognizable bits in trash cans on her way back across the city. She steals a red silk scarf and a sleek pair of shoes, ducks into a cafe and exits with a steaming cup of coffee and someone else’s purse. Fairly unrecognizable now, she walks up to one of her twitchy-looking handlers, startling him. She waves off his hissed demand of an explanation for her absence.  
“It's a shopping city,” she says breezily, “we'd attract attention if we had nothing to declare.” She takes comfort in the swell of triumph from the Black Widow and buries deeply Natalia's unsettled knot of emotions. There, see- she has no need to prove her loyalty to others. She knows her own strength.

When she's assigned to flush a target with a man whose heart and mind she’s learned as well as her own, now a stranger wearing the face of the Winter Soldier a few weeks later, she's abruptly, fiercely glad the call sign hadn't matched. If there's no one to run with, it doesn't matter that there's nowhere to run to.

There's nothing, after that, not for a long while. Now she is blood and death and followed only by hushed whispers- when Russia ceases to have many beautiful, deadly Black Widow operatives; there's only her. No one else dares claim the title.


End file.
